Why the BODathon Training Schedule Is Designed Like It Is

Beachbody CEO Carl Daikeler asked me to shed a little light on how I developed the training program for the BODathon (happening this Halloween), as it’s a little different than the standard Beachbody programs you’ve (hopefully) done. The reason is that successfully completing the BODathon is purely performance based, and this requires a slightly different approach than when your goal is only to look good.

Doing this program can certainly get you ripped, as athletes tend to look, well, athletic. But while it’s okay to finish an aesthetics-based training program with only enough energy to make it through a photo shoot, athletic programs require the body to perform at its absolute best. So let’s go through the process so you can not only see what you’re in for, but also why it should work and what to expect.

When designing a training program, you start with a goal and the time frame you have to reach that goal, and then you work backward. The BODathon takes place on October 31. Training begins on September 1, giving you nine weeks to get ready.

This goal is ambitious. You can probably get through the workouts by just following along and not pushing, but the goal is to nail each one, and that, well, that’s not going to be a picnic. These are all advanced workouts, designed to be all that you do on a given day. Hitting them one after another, and pushing as hard as you can, is going to require a higher level of fitness than most of you have now.

Given the event itself is over two hours of all-out effort, a taper is needed. Tapering is when you reduce your training load to allow muscles (particularly fast twitch, which can take two weeks to heal) to fully recover before the event. While training volume will begin to decline for the last couple of weeks, the actual taper will only really kick in during the final week.

Setting Up the Schedule
Nine weeks, minus one to taper, gives us eight to play with. There’s a training law known as The Specificity of Adaptation, which identifies how long your body can adapt positively to physiological stress before hitting an exercise plateau. The goal of any exercise program is to avoid plateaus. They signal a slowing of progress — a metabolic halt — which is frustrating when you’re trying to lose or gain weight and devastating when you’re trying to perform your best.

The biggest question, given the eight-week time frame, is whether to progress workouts steadily for eight weeks or to schedule two different blocks of training, with some recovery days in between. If you’ve ever read the P90X guide, this might sound familiar. At 90 days, like P90X, blocks are always most efficient. Over just two months, the schedule can be set up to go either way. According to the law of progressive overload, adaptation can theoretically progress for eight weeks.

When peak performance is needed and training intensity is very high, this starts to become risky. Eight weeks of progressive overload could lead to overtraining your central nervous system, which can take weeks, sometimes months, to recover from. It’s safer to use a two-block system, with an active recovery week in between to ensure you don’t overcook your body.

Using this deductive process, the schedule should be a block of progressive overload, followed with an active recovery week, the second of which should finish with a taper. Now all that’s needed is to fill up those days with workouts designed to help you achieve your goal.

Training targets: Total-body conditioning, focusing on improvements in both power and endurance, along with balance, mobility, and highly functional core strength.

Now comes the fun part: picking the workouts. It can also be tricky, especially working with something as broad as the Beachbody catalog. To do this, I worked backward by eliminating workouts that weren’t focused on the desired goal.

In the requirements and training targets lists above, there are a wide range of fitness parameters that need to be covered. You’ll notice that both hypertrophy (gaining muscle mass) and aerobic conditioning are missing from those lists. This allowed me to drop most of our super-targeted hypertrophy workouts and almost all traditional cardio, dance, and martial arts workouts. Here’s what’s left that do target the end goal:

Plyo Training. This is part of the event, so clearly you need to work on it. Plyometric training takes the longest to recover from, so I started by adding one each week, making them progressively harder over the program.

Weight Training. Since you don’t need to gain mass to nail the BODathon, I limited these to a one to two (primarily) full-body sessions a week.

Core Synergistics. This basically means full-body training. These workouts help you develop solid fitness in many areas, from mobility to balance to core strength to muscular endurance. While it’s the name of one workout, it utilizes a lot of different styles of training. Yoga, Pilates, complexes, post-activation potentiation, and almost anything using a stability ball will help you train for this.

Recovery and Mobility. Rather than give you a rest day to sit around, one day each week is dedicated to active recovery. If you’ve never done P90X2 or Tai Cheng, you may not be familiar with foam rolling. You should be. It’s one of the best ways to bring tired, worked muscles back to life. While our workouts always offer alternatives, owning a foam roller will give you most relief.

With the schedule set, all that’s left to do is push play.

Diet
Oh, and one more thing. Beachbody nutrition plans are written for programs that mainly do one workout. Most of those workouts are pretty short. The BODathon is a whole new ballgame. That 1500 calories you were eating for T25 ain’t gonna cut it. You’re going to need to eat smart to survive this. One of the easiest ways to do that is with targeted, supplemented nutrition. I’m going to hand this off to Denis Faye, who’s got a great article on how to use the Performance Line to supplement your excess training during this program. Look for it very soon.

Fitness

Fitness

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